Helm helms Sacramento Jazz Jubilee

PHILIP ELWOOD, EXAMINER MUSIC CRITIC

Published
4:00 am PDT, Friday, May 10, 1996

ON MEMORIAL Day weekend the Sacramento Traditional Jazz Society will present the 23rd annual Jazz Jubilee, which features 125 bands from around the world playing in 40 performance sites clustered into five jazz centers around the capital city.

The jubilee opens with a parade in Old Sacramento at noon on Friday, May 24, and continues - with a few hours off (like 3-9 a.m. daily) - until 4 o'clock Monday afternoon, May 27.

Reigning as Emperor of Jubilee XXIII will be clarinetist / saxophonist Bob Helm, a member of the 1940s Lu Watters Yerba Buena Jazz Band. From the 1950s to the '80s Helm played in most of trombonist Turk Murphy's bands and was, and still is, the front-line mainstay of dozens of mainstream-traditional New Orleans style jazz groups.

Now 81 and still playing with astonishing vigor and assurance, Helm (who grew up in Fairmead, Madera County) began his career during the Depression playing in innumerable dance bands. By 1939 he was working various Bay Area gigs; he played in the Sally Rand Nude Ranch band at the Treasure Island World's Fair and during World War II performed with trumpeter Bunk Johnson, among others.

At Jubilee XXIII Helm will be a working emperor, officially opening the event from the parade's reviewing stand, greeting the crowds at all of the performing sites and sitting in with many of the bands. Joining him as a senior guest artist will be last year's emperor, 93-year-old trombonist Spiegle Willcox, who 70 years ago played alongside cornetist Bix Beiderbecke in the Jean Goldkette band out of Detroit. Willcox is still playing well and still telling bad jokes.

Among the international bands at Sacramento this year - besides such returnees as St. Petersburg's Alexej Kanunnicov Jazz Band, Liverpool's Merseysippi Jazz Band and the Creole Bells from East Malvern, Australia - are such newcomers as the Three Graces from Tokyo and the Kowloon Honkers from Hong Kong.

Thirty-five hundred volunteers working with the Sacramento Traditional Jazz Society make the Sacramento Jubilee the best organized and best run event of its type in the jazz world. But the only way for newcomers and veteran jubilee-goers alike to make sense out of the whole affair is to get there early, buy a jubilee program book and work out your game plan from it for the day.

Jazz Jubilee command headquarters phone - (916) 372-5277. They have all the answers.